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Video 12: Who Stole My Parking Spot? The Challenges of Information Overload

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Learning How To Learn for Youth

Arizona State University

4.8 (295 ratings) | 7.5K Students Enrolled

Based on the most popular open online course in the world, this course gives you easy access to the learning techniques used by experts in art, music, literature, math, science, sports, and many other disciplines. No matter what your current skill level, using these approaches can help you master new topics, change your thinking and improve your life. This course explains: * Why sometimes letting your mind wander is an important part of the learning process * How to avoid "rut think" in order to think outside the box * The value of metaphors in developing understanding * A simple, yet powerful, way to stop procrastinating If you’re already an expert, these strategies will turbocharge your learning, including test-taking tips and insights that will help you make the best use of your time on homework and problem sets. We all have the tools to learn what might not seem to come naturally to us at first—the secret is to understand how the brain works so we can unlock its power. Filled with animations, application questions, and exercises, this course makes learning easy and fun!

Skills You'll Learn

Test Preparation, Learning To Learn, Pomodoro Technique, Meta Learning

Reviews

4.8 (295 ratings)

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RM

Sep 25, 2019

Excellent Course. One of the best courses I have ever attended inmy life. thanks a lot. Kudos to the Teaching Faculty - Muthiah Ramanathan, Chennai, India

NO

Feb 10, 2019

Although I'm not that young I found the course was a fun way to remember the key points of Learning how to learn, which are really useful in learning.

From the lesson

Brain Links and Study Tips

In this module, we’re going to talk more about important ideas and techniques that will enhance your ability to learn. You’ll also discover how to avoid “information overload,” and how to recognize your own strengths. Fighter pilots and surgeons use checklists to help them with their critical duties—you can use a similar checklist to help you prepare for tests. Ultimately, you will learn more about the joys of living a life filled with learning!

Video 11: How Rachel Almost Backed the Car into a…5:43

Video 12: Who Stole My Parking Spot? The Challenges of Information Overload4:59

Taught By

Dr. Barbara Oakley
Ramón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning, McMaster University
Dr. Terrence Sejnowski
Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Greg Hammons
Instructor and Motivational Speaker at Forever Phase, LLC

Transcript

Rachel is an expert now with backing up a car, because she's created a backing up set of brain links. Her attentional octopus sends an arm out to activate that set of brain links whenever she's backing up. She's so good at backing up. The most of the time, she's almost doing it in robot mode. The rest of our attentional octopus arms are free to listen to the radio or check to see if her seat belt is fastened. That's as long as nothing out of the ordinary happens, but what if someone tries to take her parking spot just as she's backing in? Her ordinary backing up set of brain links isn't enough anymore. Suddenly, she needs to snap out of robot mode. She needs all of her octopus arms that mean she has stop thinking about anything else. If you're working memory has too much to hold, it becomes difficult to figure things out. This relates to your cognitive load. That is, the amount of minor effort your working memory is making. If your working memory is already putting in a lot of effort, you can't easily add more to its load. Your octopus is already too busy. Basically, your working memory can only hold so much information in mind at once. But, brain links can make things easier. This is because your working memory can pass off the routine parts of your mental processing to the brain links. The kind of like mental helpers or like subroutines in a computer program. Brain links help free up your working memory for the harder things that you're focusing on. So, we've learned two important traits of your attentional octopus. It only wakes up and goes to work when you focus, and it only has a limited number of arms, which means it can only hold so much information at once. Distraction makes things more difficult for your octopus. It's like putting one of its arms in a sling. Here's what I mean. Let's say, you can hear a television going on in the background. Hearing the sound takes up one of your octopuses arms even when you don't think your listening. If you're distracted, your working memory can't do its job as well, because you're octopus has fewer arms to hold on to things. Can you imagine peeling a banana with only one hand instead of two? There's another problem your attentional octopus can encounter. That's when you keep switching your attention. Attention switching makes your octopus tire. Here's an example. Let's say you're writing a report about chili peppers. Your friend walks in and starts talking about last night's party. Your attentional octopus let's go the chili pepper set of brain links to grab on to what your friend is saying. When your friend leaves, your octopus has to take time to get his arms wrap all back around the chili peppers, this is tiring. So, the lesson is, avoid distractions and interruptions when you're focusing on your studies, it drains part of your brain's learning power. Before you begin to create brain links, what you're learning can often seem difficult and not very fun? For example, do you remember when you were first learning to ride a bicycle? It was hard to just stay upright. You crashed sometimes. It hurt. But, once that first more difficult learning stage past you could just jump on the bike and ride. You had become an expert, terrific. So, the important point here is that sometimes you don't enjoy what you're learning when you're still in the early stages. It will get easier, and more fun. You may think there's too much. How can I ever make brain links out of it all. Keep in mind what we call the law of serendipity. Lady luck favors the one who tries. Don't think about everything you're trying to learn. Just focus on whatever section you're studying, your intuition will give you hints about the information that's most important to link. Once you create a new set of brain links for the first problem or concept, whatever it is, the second one will go in a bit more easily, and the third more easily still. It doesn't get all super easy, but it does get easier. Creating good brain links is like creating good luck. You'll find yourself enjoying your learning more, and doing better on tests. I'm Barbara Oakley. I'm Greg Hammons. I'm Terrence Sejnowski. We and Arizona State University wish you happy learning.

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